


Si vis amari, ama

by chaos_harmony



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-14
Updated: 2012-03-14
Packaged: 2017-11-01 22:28:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/361977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaos_harmony/pseuds/chaos_harmony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-series.  Meg keeps a hold of Will for as long as she can.  (Or, character study for Will's ex-girlfriend from the series pilot.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Si vis amari, ama

She doesn’t know this yet, but years later, she’ll tell people he learned who she was because he was there when she failed an exam for the first time in her life.

*

The kid looks a little overwhelmed, and Meg supposes she can’t blame him. When he asked her how she was – in the way that amiable people sometimes do to their nameless acquaintances – he probably didn’t expect a half-coherent rant on the evils of medical school. Actually, she didn’t expect it either, but the indignant speech has been silently gathering force in the depths of her mind, somewhere between carefully memorized principles of biochemistry and physiology. Not, she notes darkly, that those reams of information will do her any good at this rate.

Still, the kid cracks a hesitant smile. He can’t really be a kid, if he’s old enough for medical school; he might even be a year or two older than her, but something about his glasses and rolled-up sleeves spells schoolboy to her.

“Well,” he says, “you only missed three questions.”

“In the real world,” she informs him acidly, “that means I killed three people.”

His schoolboy smile turns wry. It’s a nice smile, all the same, the sort that disarms onlookers without any apparent effort. “I guess it’s a good thing university isn’t the real world, then.”

Meg scowls.

“I’m Will, by the way,” he adds, “Will Zimmerman. Um, do you have a name, or would you prefer to be called something like Angry Med School Classmate?”

*

The unadorned truth: he learns who she is because he startles a genuine laugh out of her for the first time since she’s entered medical school.

And she doesn’t know this yet either, but for all the light she sees in him, he belongs to shadows.

*

The first time her lips meet his, they’re both half drunk on celebratory champagne, still riding the high of finally seeing each other through to medical degrees. He’s sprawled on her couch, tasting of alcohol and exhaustion and all the innocence in the question mark of a kiss. She’s practically on top of him, her fingers framing his face, and he sighs into her mouth, supple and yielding.

Still, a vague flash of sobriety brings her to her senses, and she draws back, forcing an awkward chuckle, then plants a chaste peck on his forehead. She finds a blanket for him, and they curl up back-to-back like siblings in a crib.

When he cries out in his sleep, sharp and sudden, she bites her tongue and doesn’t move. It isn’t the first time. It won’t be the last.

*

“What are you so afraid of?” one of her flatmates asks later. “It’s just Zimmerman. Spooky old Zimmerman. You guys have been friends forever.”

“We’ve been _friends_ ,” Meg repeats, drawing the last word out with what would have been a flourish were she a more histrionic woman.

Sarah remains unimpressed. “So?”

“So it’s weird. This just started… now. I don’t know what to do with it.”

“If by ‘this,’ you mean weird, unresolved chemistry with Zimmerman, that started in your first year of med school, honey.”

Meg throws a pillow at her.

*

“But I can’t,” she says to the reflection in her mirror, when she’s alone, “I can’t.”

She knows she isn’t enough to keep him for herself.

*

For three years after graduation, Will Zimmerman becomes nothing to her except e-mail exchanges and an occasional voice on the telephone, yet still, the taste of him clings to her like a recurring dream.

And then, somehow, they’re sharing a city.

“I haven’t been sleeping well,” he confides over coffee one afternoon. He’s older now, but he still looks like a boy to her. Perhaps he always will.

Meg shoots him a wry look. “Police work will do that to you. You could have worked at the ICU with me, you know.”

He sips his latte, smiling with his eyes. He still wears the same glasses he had in school. “Nah. I like psychiatry. Criminal profiling’s as close to a dream job as I could get.”

She snorts. “You always were a Sherlock Holmes geek.” Impulsively, she puts a hand on his. “How are you, really?”

He doesn’t lose the smile when he puts his drink down, not exactly. But his brow creases, and his eyes dart away from hers to focus on the table between them. She thinks he looks sadder. “I still have bad dreams,” he tells her, running a thumb over her wrist absent-mindedly.

She makes as if to speak, but instead finds herself tightening her grip on his hand, as if physical strength alone might keep him anchored in her world.

*

It can. God as her witness, it can, if only for a moment, but that moment is sweet enough for her to try. It has to be.

*

The act of love tiptoes into their reborn friendship through the doorways of too many lonely nights, finding a place between old routines of togetherness: hands lingering over bare skin during dinner in an apartment kitchen, slender fingers sliding between legs during a cheap Blockbuster movie, casual banter that turns to teeth marking bared flesh.

Meg maps the physicality of him in her mind’s eye, that long-ago drunken taste of him her starting point. Her clever medical mind memorizes the lay of the land, while she moves over him between their rumpled sheets. Flush against him in the dead of night, she can make herself believe that her touch is enough to keep the secret demons of his soul at bay.

When Will wakes up with nightmares still in his eyes, she soothes him back to sleep, and reminds herself, with her arms full of haunted boy, of his smile, and how he used to make her laugh. Oh, most of all, how that boy could make her laugh.

“You’re mine,” she whispers sometimes, brushing his hair back from his forehead in the rare moments when he sleeps in peace, “right now, you’re mine.”

*

Two more years, she holds him fast.

She holds him for as long as she can bear it.


End file.
